What's in a name? The 2007 Microsoft Office System

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In case you missed the announcement, we finally ditched Office "12" and can now talk about the "2007 Microsoft Office System release" instead so time for me to update my autosig yet again.   

The 2007 Office release is the most significant release of Office for a decade, adding further servers, applications and services to expand and enhance the Office System.

 

All of the detailed information is available on the preview site as usual but here is a short summary:

 

There are three important new suites which give our customers greater choice in finding a version of Office that suits their specific needs, whether home or business users. There are two new suites for our volume license customers:

·         Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 (a significantly updated release of Microsoft Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003)

·         Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007

 

And for home users:

  • Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 (which will no longer require the presence of a student in the household to qualify for purchase)

We have also announced two new product offerings:

  • Microsoft Office Groove 2007 – an update of the Groove Virtual Office collaboration software
  • Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 – which will allow for the delivery of compelling and attractive Sharepoint sites, workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools on the Sharepoint platform

We’ve also announced new and improved servers within the 2007 Microsoft Office System

·         Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007

·         Microsoft Office Project Server 2007

·         Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007

·         Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007

·         Microsoft Office Groove Server 2007

 

To answer Guy Kewney's question the plan is still to ship our public beta in the spring (that's northern hemisphere's spring) and release the full product by the end of 2006.

 

The full name "2007 Microsoft Office System", although admittedly a bit harder to say (and I challenge anyone who reckons they have to say it more often than I do), is emphasising the vision of Office which is be the provide the whole environment for information workers. That is not just the apps you know today like Word, Excel and PowerPoint but the tightly integrated combination of the servers, services, Applications and Solutions.